TOP 100 CAMPING SITES
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| How do marine mammals avoid freezing to death? Whales, dolphins, seals and other marine mammals can generate their own heat and maintain a stable body temperature despite fluctuating environmental conditions. Like people, they are endothermic homeotherms--or more colloquially, "warm-blooded." [More] rss.sciam.com |
Before Summer Camps Throw Open Doors, Girding for Swine Flu Even as outbreaks were reported at some camps, others, like Frost Valley Y.M.C.A. in the Catskill Mountains, were preparing by washing surfaces with bleach and warning parents to keep sick children home. nytimes.com |
Will Tree Plantations Spur the Release of Carbon Locked in Soil? ALBUQUERQUE--Because forests can lock away carbon in their woody trunks, planting vast swaths of trees on barren land could provide a means for countries to mitigate their carbon emissions. But a comprehensive new analysis warns that pine plantations can rapidly deplete the soil of its nutrients--and carbon--thereby reducing the benefits. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Steven Chu to greenhouse gases: We will bury you The U.S. Secretary of Energy-- channeling former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev perhaps?--has one thing to say in this week's Science to the greenhouse gases emitted by coal-fired power plants: We will bury you. Nobel laureate Steven Chu's department has funneled $3.4 billion in stimulus dollars to research and develop the technology known as carbon capture and storage (CCS). [More] rss.sciam.com |
Zoning for Oceans: Balancing Our Competing Needs in the Seas For decades the seas off U.S. shores have been roiled by controversies over where to drill for oil, how to reel in overfishing , and whom to blame for toxic streams of continental runoff. A failure to manage these problems effectively has already put the nation’s oceanic realms in serious jeopardy. And now we are inviting new industries to stake their own claims on the blue frontier. To generate clean energy from wind and tides, we need permanent installations. To grow more food, we need offshore farms.Without a plan to manage these proliferating activities, they are very likely to exacerbate the existing shambles. President Barack Obama turned a spotlight to this challenge in June, when he charged an interagency task force with detailing the country’s first national ocean policy. Its official report is due out this month, but a draft hints at a bold way of reconciling our competing needs and interests, both economic and environmental: zoning U.S. waters (which extend 200 nautical miles from the coast) much the way we zone our cities and public lands [see “ Ocean Overhaul ,” by Sarah Simpson]. [More] rss.sciam.com |